Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: What Now?
In June, our country not only faced a global pandemic, but the systemic racism that impacts so many became real for everyone. Our streets filled with protestors and military helicopters buzzed overhead. The news was heartbreaking. But, we knew this was overdue and our country would be better for it.
In times like these, it is impossible to underestimate the power of strong leadership. Leadership you trust. Leaders who care. We are exceedingly lucky to have just that at Upside Business Travel. Our leadership team has inspired me and heartened me in many ways throughout my time at Upside but never more so than during these last tumultuous and challenging months.
While our leadership team took extra care to lead us thoughtfully, effectively and with grace while navigating the pandemic (and I will never take that for granted) and the creative business pivots were astonishingly impressive, they showed us all the human side of business through the social justice crisis even more so. They — and particularly our CEO, Scott Case — put “people first” into action in a whole new way.
The Monday morning after protests surrounding George Floyd’s death erupted all over our country — our daily all company standup was sobering and heavy but powerful. Our morning meetings are usually a time to connect and celebrate the previous day’s wins, share some light hearted jokes — -motivate for the day ahead. I joined the call that morning and was struck by the black shirt in nearly every little zoom box. The tone was — instantly and without a word — -mournful, and that felt right. Scott started the call and was quickly overwhelmed by emotion. I have never in my life seen a more real, raw and human side of any leader as I did that day. We all knew massive change in our country must happen and we all knew we wanted Upside to effect that change in ways both big and small.
Upside hosted a forum the following day for our team to simply share and discuss our thoughts with one another. The company closed on Friday that week for a day of reflection. We took the time to quietly process, and then, because we are Upsiders, we jumped into action.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has always been critically important to us as a company and we’ve worked hard to weave that into the fabric of our everyday lives here at Upside. But, we’ve also always known we had more to do.
Scott began to use his large network and social media reach to reinforce the need for real, deep change publishing daily thought leadership pieces and articles from others. We have begun company wide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) workshops and have increased our DEI focused events. We have been sharing our demographic metrics for the past six quarters with our team and looking for new ways to engage in our own community. We also incorporated these key metrics into our company OKRs and Operating Standards to stay focused on them week in and week out.
This work isn’t easy and it’s often uncomfortable. It will take time. But we will show up for this work each and every day and someday, we’ll look back on this time and remember the good that came out of the struggle.
Our leadership team has set the tone, but Upside is a team through and through and so like anything else it is the work of the entire team that will move us forward. Over the next few weeks, our Team Blog will feature a series of Upsiders sharing their own experiences with our DEI efforts and we look forward to the conversations to come.
